https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/9/15/23352448/whitney-band-new-album-spark-interview

Photo by Tonje Thilesen/Ringer illustration

Here’s a sentence I never expected to type: I’m currently getting run off the court by the band Whitney.

It’s a pleasant mid-July afternoon in their hometown of Chicago, and we’re playing a game of H-O-R-S-E at a school a few blocks from the walk-up apartment they share with an assortment of vintage synths. The affable, bespectacled duo at the center of the group—guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Max Kakacek, brown-haired and a shade over 6 feet, and drummer/singer ​​Julien Ehrlich, falsetto-voiced and currently a bottle blonde—are taking it to me. And not with trick shots or anything too technical: After shaking off some rust, Kakacek and Ehrlich begin draining corner 3s and jumpers. Before long, I’m sitting on “E.” When Kakacek hits a shot from the top of the key and my follow-up clanks, I’m out. (Score one for Team Musician in the eternal back-and-forth with Team Music Press. At least the Whitney boys were kind enough to not gloat.)

It’s not how I was planning to start my visit with Kakacek and Ehrlich, but the pair have been full of surprises since they formed Whitney in the mid-2010s. Rising from the ashes of Smith Westerns—a small but buzzy band that Max and Julien played in a decade ago—Whitney became playlist darlings thanks to their 2016 AM Gold-styled debut, Light Upon the Lake. That album’s sun-soaked soft rock was the perfect soundtrack for a Sunday morning stroll or sunset in the park. (Or later, an Instagram Reel.) Songs like “No Woman” and “Golden Days” broke out as modest hits, and none other than Sir Elton John declared himself one of Whitney’s biggest backers. (Here’s the Rocket Man himself interviewing Ehrlich in The New York Times.) By mining the past, Whitney created a comfortable present for themselves. Over the next few years, Kakacek and Ehrlich would become a Chicago institution, with a craft beer made in their honor and Whitney Day declared by the city to mark their second LP, 2019’s Forever Turned Around. It was quite the come-up for two guys whose previous band was more likely to be mentioned on Hipster Runoff than in a mayoral proclamation.

This week, Kakacek and Ehrlich return with perhaps their biggest surprise yet. On Friday, Whitney will release their third proper album, SPARK. Somewhere between a natural evolution of their sound and a total reinvention of it, SPARK expands the idea of what the band is. Light Upon the Lake and Forever Turned Around appealed to a certain type of listener obsessed with reel-to-reel recordings and analog instrumentation. SPARK does away with those notions, tapping into their wide range of influences, from early aughts pop to R&B to UGK and Outkast’s all-timer, “Int’l Players Anthem.”

Written mostly in the early days of the pandemic, while Kakacek and Ehrlich dealt with devastating loss and romantic heartbreaks, SPARK is loaded with synths and electronic flourishes. The drum parts were largely sampled from Ehrlich’s playing, then chopped up or looped. In some instances, songs were completely deconstructed digitally before being pieced back together. While most of these songs are unmistakably Whitney—Ehrlich’s voice and Kakacek’s ear for melody always shine through—it feels like an exciting (and logical) new direction for them. Take a song like lead single “REAL LOVE”: It’s a radiant mélange of keys over a pulsating drum break—poppier and more immediate than anything Whitney’s ever released before, but no less infectious than “Golden Days” or “No Matter Where We Go.” (The proof is in a recent Jimmy Kimmel Live! appearance, where Whitney sounds like a band reborn playing the song.)

“If you really dig down deep into our souls, this is what we wanted to do and what we’ve always been working toward,” Ehrlich says. “It reflects what we listen to and what we’re inspired by in the same way that the first record did too.”

The simplest way to think of the difference in Whitney records is: If their earlier albums sounded like ’70s soul-rock records ripe for sampling, then SPARK sounds like the more modern end result of that process. But the new record isn’t a case of two talented musicians showing off some new tricks, flipping their sound to stay current, or even trying to surprise their fans. SPARK became a means of survival—two close collaborators and even closer friends finding a way to fight back when they may have been sitting on “E” themselves.

It was a technological miscalculation that doubles as a tidy metaphor. Midway through the sessions for Forever Turned Around, producer Brad Cook noticed that the vintage tape machine Whitney was recording to wasn’t properly calibrated. As he and the band experimented, they lost track of the tonal center of songs, which messed up the pitch and made overdubs and digital tracking a difficult—if not near-impossible—process. It quickly became the bane of the existence of mostly everyone involved. “We were still playing with tape speed all the time,” Cook says. “We almost ruined it because we weren’t really paying attention that much.”

In Cook’s eyes, Kakacek and Ehrlich had placed unnecessary restrictions on themselves throughout the making of their sophomore LP. The pair—the creative engine of Whitney, which also includes a handful of other musicians who play with them on tour and in the studio—went into Forever Turned Around wanting to double down on the sound of the breakout Light Upon the Lake. But by doing so, Kakacek and Ehrlich boxed themselves into what instruments they could use or how they could record, Cook says. “I brought a little Mellotron synth with me, and it got voted off the island so fast,” Cook says. “It’s like, ‘No way. We don’t put a synthesizer on any of our records.’ That was the general vibe.”

Partly because of those limitations, Forever Turned Around became one of the most arduous musical processes Kakacek and Ehlrich had ever been involved with. While they both say they remain proud of the record, it didn’t come as naturally as Light Upon the Lake, even if it was largely a success thanks to breezy songs like “Valleys (My Love)” and “Giving Up.” “I feel like when any artist talks about what felt to them as a struggle or a dip creatively or working through some writer’s block, it can totally diminish the product,” Ehrlich says. “But we just have a really high bar of what we think a record should be, an official release needs to be. It was just so hard to get there on that record.”

Circumstances would ensure that wouldn’t be the case for their next album, however. In early 2020, Ehrlich decamped to Portland, Oregon, to stay in a Craigslist rental following the end of what he calls “the most important relationship in my life up to that point.” Kakacek followed soon after (he’d later experience his own difficult breakup). The idea was to regroup and work on new music before hitting the road later that year. However, a few days after Kakacek arrived in March, the plan changed—the pandemic had reached a tipping point, and suddenly they were sheltering in place in a city thousands of miles away from the Windy City. “We were supposed to go to the Blazers-Grizzlies game the night that the NBA shut down,” Kakacek says. “Then it was like, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to be here.’ That was the beginning of what became our life. We ended up being in this house in Portland for a year and a half.”

Of course, isolating 2,000 miles from home becomes slightly easier when you’re doing it with someone you trust. And over the course of the past decade-plus, Kakacek and Ehrlich have grown to trust each other as much as anyone else in their lives. They met when they were barely adults and first joined musical forces a little over a decade ago, after Ehrlich parted ways with Unknown Mortal Orchestra and joined Kakacek in Smith Westerns. While Kakacek and Ehrlich are disinclined to discuss the details, Smith Westerns split for good in 2014. Soon after, the two formed Whitney, named after a fictional long-lost musician they dreamed up. (Think: Jim Sullivan or Sixto Rodriguez.)

While the story behind the band’s name was fanciful, what they wanted out of their union was not: They sought stability in their creative partnership. Kakacek and Ehrlich have gotten that and then some—counting the quarantine sojourn to Portland, they’ve lived together for the better part of a decade, and they say they’ve learned how to process disagreements without threatening the things that matter most.

“In this band, it’s just always been a friendship first and it’s never felt like work at all,” Ehrlich says. “As much as we’ll sometimes complain about it and notice large cracks in the music industry and feel slightly depressed about it maybe, it still doesn’t feel like work because we love each other.”

Planted in the Pacific Northwest amid personal, societal, and climate unrest, Kakacek and Ehrlich had each other, but they didn’t have their typical tools at their disposal. (For starters, there were no drums in that house.) They began writing and demoing songs using samples, synths, and DAWs. And while those songs weren’t initially intended to sound that way in their final form, Kakacek says it ended up being a “happy accident.” Ultimately, those early sketches pushed the pair to make music that inspired them in ways Forever Turned Around hadn’t. The new tracks weren’t just utilizing different kinds of instrumentation and replacing guitars with synths—they also broke out of the traditional song structures that Whitney had deployed on their earlier work. No longer bound by fealty to the past, they could push their songwriting to new places.

“We are still the same band from 2016 or whatever, and we can bust out all the songs live,” he says. “I think that sonically, the tools that we were using on this new record and the tools that we were discovering just allowed us to write the best songs that we could possibly write.”